Quality WordPress Theme – My Review of Thesis
I broke down and bought the new Thesis WordPress theme. It’s a quality wordpress theme but it’s not free. It’s the first time I’ve purchased a theme. I usually pay someone to customize a free theme. I’m still learning it but here’s my preliminary review.
Is Thesis worth it?
I think it is. I like that I can change the width of my columns and number of columns very easily. I like that it’s very easy to change the font face and size (wish that included color). Things that would take a long time are much quicker and site wide rather than having to go into many files. With Thesis I only edit one file instead of widgets or code. They have a design panel and a regular panel that has a large menu of options for making global changes.
I also like how you can choose a template for each page. Just choose from a dropdown and you can choose to show a template that doesn’t have a sidebar. So it makes it much easier to operate the site like pages of a web site rather than a blog.
Technical Skills
I’m still learning but what I don’t like is that you still need some technical skills to make changes to the header image, background image and tweaks like that. I use hooks (a separate download) which help me place ads in the right places but they’re a little complicated because you need to know CSS. There are tutorials but again I wish this was easier to use. It’s even confusing to me than editing code from the files themselves.
Aesthetics
The style is so boxy and plain. Most of the customizations I’ve seen still have that feel. I’m not sure how to round corners or make the site look more aesthetically pleasing. Even adding a new header is a pain. Many bloggers stick with Blogger because they have more designs out of the box. Of course you can pay someone to design your site. There aren’t a lot of designs that appeal to women. I talked to Joseph Scott and his wife about it last week. He works on WordPress (programmer). I’m not sure he’s convinced that it’s as big of an issue as I think it is.
What do you think about Thesis WP theme?
4 Responses to “Quality WordPress Theme – My Review of Thesis”
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May 19th, 2009 at 7:14 am
thnx for the overview. i was actually going back and forth about this as well. your analysis helps!!
May 20th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
I recently switched to Thesis about 3 months ago. I agree, you do have to have some CSS skills to make drastic changes but it’s still the best theme I’ve used ever.
What also helped me was installing the Firebug plugin on FireFox. If I ever wanted to know what code to edit to change certain things, Firebug shows me what tag to use.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Melissa,
Let me know if you buy it and what you think. Love it if you used my link in this post.
Lisa,
Thanks for the Firefox plugin tip! I forgot about it since I rarely use code. Very helpful.
-Janet
May 24th, 2009 at 10:29 am
I’m posting this for Mike (thank you for your persistence and comment, Mike):
I enjoyed your review of Thesis. I migrated my blog http://www.htstechtips.com to Thesis from a free theme about a month ago and am finding the switch to be very worthwhile. Although I had to spend $87 I’ll save that amount many times over through increased efficiency in managing and maintaining my blog.
I’m not a hard core coder and I love the fact that I don’t really have to write css or php code to utilize the full functionality of Thesis. The OpenHook plugin you mention really extends the coding-free capabilities even further.
One other item that I believe is a particularly strong point for DIY Themes’ Thesis is the robustness of the support community. There is plenty of good information on the DIY Themes site, in the forums and in the Answers section. There are also a number of other unaffiliated sites providing information, insight and support to varying degrees.
Rather than listing individual site here is a very recent post from Matt Langford at his “Matt Flies” blog entitled, “100 Resources for Thesis WordPress Theme Users.”
http://mattflies.com/tech/100-resources-for-thesis-wordpress-theme-users
Well worth checking out. Hope you find some of this helpful.
–Mike McEvoy